The Sun Will Rise
by themanofonebook
Summary: "Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise." A look at the lives of Valjean and Javert through long nights, fires, stars, and sunrises.


**Even the Darkest Night will End and the Sun will Rise**

* * *

Valjean was born with the sun in his eyes.

He was of Faverolles; he grew there, made his living there as a pruner, working to support both himself and his sister; eventually, her children were added to his burden; but he did not complain. This was a burden he bore well. He would wake in the morning, rise and go out with his tools in hand.

Sitting on a stray wall or low roof, he would watch the Earth become grey, and then pink. A rosy mist settled over the land, and Valjean was content to bask in it, for it was new day and new hope, and it whispered of love and tenderness; when days were long and difficult, the morning reminded him that the light would always be there to embrace its children.

What Javert knew of the sun was composed of the rays cast through the bars of a cell window.

He was lucky, he supposed in a way that was not the sullen grumble of a child but the removed and logical observation of an adult; many cells did not have windows. He was one of the few to wake and pull himself up on a slate, grey eyes widening with wonder for those minutes only as he caught a glimpse of orange painting the sea in gorgeous, mottled tones.

Then it was gone, and Javert would drag himself through the day as best he could. That light held no promise, for it was of the outside, and not for him; warmth was a blessing given to those born in Apollo's cradle, and Javert was of the gutter, and those in the gutter were meant to look down. Raising ones face to the light was not an option.

The sun over Toulon was hot.

Valjean was a man once, but here he was a beast made to slave and wear his muscles, flesh, and bone away. The very essence of his being withered under this red fireball in the sky. There had been a time, he knew, when the sun was kind and granted hope to those who beheld it.

Now the wash of light through his prison cell was a promise of labor, of toil and pain and a constant stream of unheard and unanswered prayers for his back not to break, for how long could a man work on the chain before he snapped in two?

His body bore what his mind could not. He stopped praying.

The Southern sun was an eye, and it watched Javert even as he watched the prisoners. It kept him in his place, reminded him that there was always a higher power, another rung on the endless ladder of authority which he was not meant to ascend. It boiled him in his uniform, caused the thick material to stick to his skin.

In the coolness of night, he would peel it away and examine the film of sweat over his body. Slimy. Revolting. A reminder of what he was in the dark. Javert needed the sun as he needed the stars at night; but Javert would only ever be a star, for how could one born of darkness and composed of righteousness and rigidity ever hope to match the untamed flaming wonder of something so free and so large? He was justice, he was blindness; the sun illuminated him for all to see, seared away the shadows and left only the law. Javert did not fear the sun. He respected it; and he did not stop to watch it rise, for he cared only for its full form and found nothing worth remembering in its slow climb into the sky.

Mayor Madeleine was a candle.

Gentle, kind, and white; Monsieur le Maire was more than willing to spread his light and life amongst his people; like the sun, he warmed the town he presided over equally, dispelling shadows and calling in washes of color and joy. Nobody was exempt from his love.

Not even Javert.

The brush of a hand, the pounding of one very unsure heart and another certain in its mission. Lips touched again and again, body flush against body. Javert stared into the flame, watched it flicker and dance as wax dripped down to collect into the tiny golden dish at the base. It illuminated his night, when the stars were covered by clouds, the pricks of white hidden by false identity.

The candle would not last. They spent one morning together, on the docks, wrapped in each other and watching the sun rise over the city - their city. A bright canary yellow; it caught in Javert's eyes, turned them to melted butter. Madeleine kissed him, and the circle in the sky locked them firmly together for life.

The flame went out. The world was plunged into darkness.

It was night when Javert pursued Jean Valjean across Paris. The sun had no place here; its warmth, its watching eye. Javert was a hound out of control, Valjean a fox running for his life. Javert moved from blotch to blotch of light, and that half-formed thing in his chest cracked a bit more at each pool of darkness. Valjean was on fire; he carried with him a small bird, a brown and dirty thing from a mother of pure gold; even as he ran, he clutched her to his chest, and the stump of a candle was spared as the fire shifted to something eternal - a sun of its own. Valjean rose, passed over a wall, and was gone; he had set in the west, to rest in the perpetual dusk of the convent.

Javert was alone when the dawn came the next morning, broken and spent. Jean Valjean was alive, M. le Maire was dead, and the sun beat down mercilessly upon the man who had once been a boy, a child which believed itself undeserving of the warmth that a convict now possessed for himself. He shut out the sun. He shut out _his_ sun.

There was no light when they met again at the barricade, only choking darkness; any sparks that flew there were of their own design. The flame was only there in touch; traveling through their veins, leaving scorch marks on their skin that would be gone all too soon.

There was fire there, yes; Apollo held all of the guns, but he would not raise the sun until the threat was gone from his barricade, for fear that the shadow of the inspector would endure. The god settled for the shortest bursts of orange and red, in men's breasts, in their heads; only the ringing left behind in the ears of those who heard remained to remind them of those that they had lost. Those bodies would be exposed. Not yet.

Javert clung to his candle in the darkness, but it was over all too soon; the slice of a knife, through bonds and not flesh; a push in the other direction; a whispered word - "go". The man born in blackness was turned away from the only light that he had known in his life that was bright enough to burn away the cover over him.

Valjean could not see the stars reflected in Javert's eyes.

He should have known then.

A day passed; neither of them watched the sun. Their eyes were focused on their feet, on the bodies, and on the past. The brief illumination passed them by, and the sun slunk away once more.

Night brought them together. Javert walked from his candle willingly this time, and stared down into water so vicious and black that surely, surely this abyss could swallow even the stars. He was willing to try.

"Javert! Javert, pardieu-!"

Hands on his face, ghosting over broken bones. Somebody had witnessed his jump, somebody had run to the narrow bank to wade in after him; a fool's errand, that only a saint could have survived. And therein lay Javert's answer.

"Ne dormez pas! Javert! Ouvrez vos yeux!"

The sun was breaking over a tattered Paris, turning the Seine blood red; a vein through the heart of France, pulsing with the faded lives of all who had died that night, and preparing itself to absorb one more.

Javert forced his eyes open a slit. Orange. Red. Pink. The clouds swirled overhead, cut through with fire, but the inspector saw none of it. His gaze was focused on the largest star of all, creeping its way up into the sky. A shuddering gasp rattled in his chest, and his hand spasmed to clutch at his savior's. Slowly, a smile was stretching over his face; an attempt at the usual sneer, but any hope of that was washed away in lieu of the devotion and awe that had been filling its place for years on end. He did not look behind him. He did not have to.

"Ah! C'est vous!"

He expired. Jean Valjean wept.

It would be unfair to exclude Jean Valjean's final sunrise, but the problem made itself in that it was never recalled by the man himself; he would see many sunrises after Javert's eyes had shut at long last. Some would dawn on days of pain, others on days of joy; but his final light came in the form of a star.

Fighting for breath, the slim hands of his saving grace clutching at him, Valjean stared over the heads of his children towards the door through which the doctor had just disappeared. The bishop waited beyond that door, this he knew, but his interest was in the glow slowly forming in his mind rather than in the room. Unbeknownst to him, his eyelids had already closed, never to open again; but he could still _see_, and he gazed upon the figure outlined by a halo and the golden glory of Heaven's gates with a mixture of surprise and joy.

Javert bent and took him up in his arms, for it would take a monumental angel to hold a monumental soul.


End file.
